How To Keep Your Bookkeeping Receipts Safe

One of the main things that my clients struggle with is how to keep their bookkeeping receipts safe. If you are going to be in business, tracking your receipts is a necessary evil that many of you try to avoid.

How Long Do You Need To Keep Your Receipts?

Lets start with the basics, according to the IRS, you should keep your business records for between 3 and 6 years, depending on what type of audit you might come under. Here is a link to their How long should I keep records? Having your receipts available to back up your accounting numbers will make any actions they take against you less onerous.

What Receipt Format Will The IRS Accept

According to the IRS Recordkeeping Requirements, “In general, storage system must reliably transfer, store, index, preserve, retrieve, and reproduce electronically stored books and records, and any records reproduced must have high degree of legibility when displayed or reproduced.” We use the Neat Receipt System for scanning and storing receipts for our clients in a scannable PDF format. This allows us to make multiple digital copies of them that ARE acceptable to the IRS.

Will You Take Care of This For Me?

We handle receipts for all of our monthly bookkeeping clients. Those shoe boxes and baggies can be a thing of the past! If you are not going to have a bookkeeper handle this for then you need to watch out for…

Vanishing receipts. That is right, you can do everything perfectly, sorting into the correct piles, filing in the right folders, categorizing by year, month or day and STILL get in trouble with the IRS. Those hard copy receipts can fade over time, leaving you with nothing but white bits of paper to try and plead your case.

Bookkeeping receipts are the one area that I find to be the most problematic for my small biz owners. Seriously, if you are going to be in business, make sure that you are protecting yourself against problems down the line!